Runyon Without Romance

The supposition was that when the late Damon Runyon immortalized such citizens as Angie the Ox, the Lemon Drop Kid and Meyer Marmalade, he had largely consulted his own imagination. But last week, when Senator Estes Kefauver's antimonopoly subcommittee opened hearings in Washington on the fight racket, the characters who took the stand to describe the octopus grip of the underworld on U.S. boxing were pure Runyon--but Runyon without romance.

Dominating the proceedings from offstage was Racketeer Frankie Carbo, 56, known to business colleagues as "The Uncle," "The Southern Salesman," "Mr. Grey" and (in his younger, hungrier days) "Jimmy the Wop." Once convicted of manslaughter and five times arrested on suspicion of murder, Carbo is currently serving a two-year sentence for illegally operating as a boxing manager and matchmaker. In Carbo's absence, his pervasive influence over the boxing world was detailed by a man who should know: Truman K. Gibson Jr., 48, Negro ex-secretary of the now defunct ring monopoly, the International Boxing Club.

The Facts of Life. A onetime (1948-51) member of the President's Committee on Religion and Welfare in the Armed Forces, University of Chicago Graduate Gibson imperturbably testified that Carbo was one of "the facts of life" in boxing. In order to ensure that Carbo would make the boxers he controlled available for I.B.C. fights, said Gibson, the I.B.C. paid more than $40,000 to the ganglord's wife whose last known address proved to be half a mile out in Florida's Biscayne Bay.

There were other facts of life, too, Gibson admitted. The cartel paid $9,000 to Hoodlum Frank ("Blinky") Palermo, who is allegedly running Carbo's boxing empire while the boss is in jail. While Gibson doodled, Subcommittee Investigator John Bonomi summed up his testimony: "Almost every leading manager or promoter in the U.S. is either closely associated with or controlled by Frankie Carbo in some degree."

Wyatt Earp's Boy. Gibson, himself under indictment for conspiring to muscle in on the earnings of former Welterweight Champion Don Jordan, was followed by a parade of less communicative witnesses. Among them:

P:"Hymie the Mink" (square moniker: Herman Wallman), a Manhattan furrier turned boxing manager, who could not hide his astonishment at Gibson's volubility ("You or I would take the Fifth Amendment," Hymie told a reporter). Admitting that he knew Carbo shuffled managers and fighters like a deck of marked cards, Wallman nonetheless professed astonishment at "all this stuff about stealing and robbing." P:Carmen Basilio, broken-nosed ex-middleweight, ex-welterweight champion, who proclaimed himself enraged that men like Carbo and Palermo were ruining boxing, but who restrained "my inner feelings because there are ladies here." P:Jack Kearns, aging (79) ballyhoo artist who once managed Jack Dempsey, and the moving spirit behind a boxing managers' guild, whose "good will" Gibson claimed to have purchased at a cost of $130,000. Kearns's chief contribution: a bland assertion that as a young boxer he himself was managed by Wyatt Earp and knocked around Alaska with Author Jack London.

At week's end earnest Estes Kefauver, who is trying to decide whether a federal boxing commission is necessary to "clean up the sport," found another talkative witness: ailing (heart trouble) James Norris, millionaire ex-president of the International Boxing Club. Confirming most of Gibson's testimony, Norris added that Carbo had been a useful "convincer" in lining up such boxers as Basilio and former Middleweight Champ Jake LaMotta for I.B.C. fights. But socially, said Racing Fan Norris, dealing with Carbo had been a heavy trial, had even "embarrassed me with my horses."

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